(_b_) It was argued, on the other hand, by the opponents of Christianity that it was a mere mimicry of philosophy or a blurred copy of it. “They weave a web of misunderstandings of the old doctrine,” says Celsus,[219] “and sound them forth with a loud trumpet before men, like hierophants booming round those who are being initiated in mysteries.” Christianity was but a misunderstood Platonism. Whatever in it was true had been better expressed before.[220] Even the striking and distinctive saying of the Sermon on the Mount, “Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also,” was but a coarser and more homely way of saying what had been extremely well said by Plato’s Socrates.[221] * * * * * It was through this kinship of ideas that Christianity was readily absorbed by some of the higher natures in the Greek world. The two classes of ideas probably came into contact in philosophical Judaism. For it is clear on the one hand that the Jews of the dispersion had a literature, and on the other hand that that literature was clothing itself in Greek forms and attracting the attention of the Greek world. Some of that literature was philosophical. In the Sibylline verses, the poem of Phocylides, and the letters of Heraclitus, there is a blending of theology and ethics: in some of the writings which are ascribed to Philo, but which in reality bridge the interval between Philo and the Christian Fathers, there is a blending of theology and metaphysics. None of them are “very far from the kingdom of God.” The hypothesis that they paved the way for Christian philosophy is confirmed by the fact that in the first articulate expressions of that philosophy precisely those elements are dominant which were dominant in Jewish philosophy. Two such elements may specially be mentioned: (1) the allegorical method of interpretation which was common to both Jews and Greeks, and by means of which both the Gnostics who were without, and the Alexandrians who were within, the pale of the associated communities, were able to find their philosophy in the Old Testament as well as in the New; (2) the cosmological speculations, which occupied only a small space in the thoughts of earlier Greek thinkers, but which were already widening to a larger circle on the surface of Greek philosophy, and which became so prominent in the first Christian philosophies as to have thrust aside almost all other elements in the current representations of them. * * * * *